Breaking! Day One for Obama's New Press Secretary!

The standing-room-only crowd in the White House briefing room might lead one to believe something important was going to happen there today, but you could ask any one of them there: Former Time magazine White House correspondent Jay Carney's debut on the other side of the podium was less a news event than a ritual.

He performed as well as anyone in the position to can be expected to: He made no news—not-making-news is in the press secretary's job description. He was minimally charming and maximally on point. He wore a dark maroon tie with blue stripes.

He is my former boss and occasional pal, and on the latter point I'm hardly alone. "I don't recognize all of you," he demurred at one point; the implication, obviously, that he did recognize many. Critics on the right have charged that Carney's entry into the administration—first as a Biden spokesman, now as the man "promot[ing] the president and the messages he's trying to convey"—is a vertical move rather than a lateral one: from covert agent to station chief. And it's true that the skills prized in a mainstream reporter are not that different from those required of a political mouthpiece: an ability to suss out what an audience wants to hear, a desire to be the first person to say it, a memory that goes back only as far as the last time you saw a camera. Ideologically, it's no secret that most reporters are to the left of the spectrum, but the main difference for Carney now is that his messaging will be more clear.

Will Carney do things differently than Gibbs? He zipped through the front-line reporters that used to take up half of Gibbs' briefing with casual banter and umpteen follow-up questions. He took questions from two foreign reporters, with is two more than Gibbs usually called on. He also twice invoked his own experience: "I know where you're coming from, literally."

Ultimately, Gibbs was a cheeky good-old-boy who wielded sports references and twangy put-downs as distractions, and whose contempt for the press informed our own self image. Ironically, Carney probably just feels pity. He knows where we're coming from, and, on his way out the door, he told us he's glad he's left: "I like it up here."

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